Hi everyone, I have been observing sun activity for a few years now by visiting various websites. We are in the photon belt, and this shows as increased activity, but I have not followed the sun in earlier years so I can't report much observation of my own over a long time. I only acquired an internet connection in December 2000 when I bought a new computer with a trial subscription and I didn't really begin to look at any of the science sites until maybe 4-5 years ago.

I visit almost daily of late, www.spaceweather.com  and  SOHO, http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/  

Space Weather has a list of interesting links on it to start your exploration if you have such an interest and don't know where to start. Space Weather accepts pictures from back yard astromers and posts a lot of these making it an interesting site covering a variety of subject matter. There are often pretty aurora pics, comet pics and the like. If you have a telescope you can find information from time to time on where the International Space station is, and related other objects to watch.

On SOHO you can review older pics, called the Best of SOHO, that will show what our sun looked like a number of years ago when it was at the highpoint of the previous sun cycle. Sun cycles last about 11 years, and the "min" we are currently in between cycles has apparently been a longer and quieter period of "min" that in times past. This is because star fleet scientists have deliberately delayed the coming cycle to buy a bit more time for man to grow in these final days of our old cycle. The new solar cycle will be a "doozie."

The last 6 weeks or thereabouts, the sun has begun having more Coronal Mass Ejections, called CME's for short. These leave Coronal Holes, which result in an increased solar wind. When these Coronal Holes are facing earth, the increase in solar wind carrives on earth about 4-5 days later,  after the appearance of the coronal hole. I am sensitive to this increase in the solar wind, my body tends to buzz and tingle a bit during them, and I sometimes have increased fatigue.

The CME's nearly stopped late summer and early fall, since then we have had an earth facing one maybe every week to 10 days. I haven't kept tract. We are an increased wind today from a small coronal hole. There have been pics showing non earth facing CME's lately. There was a huge one going out from the eastern side of the sun about 2 weeks ago. This showed on the Lasco views.

The sun brightens periodically as part of our ascension, and I didn't notice this brightening either the past few months, until again maybe 2 weeks ago now, twice at least in that time. I don't like wearing sunglasses, rarely need them, but on these days, when I am out walking I squint like crazy for a few days until my eyes adjust. This brightening is because our sun jumps in frequency. Earth is brighter too, and evidence of this in the brighter moon, since the moon reflects some of our light.  However, the moon and our planets are all increasing in frequency vibration, and thus glow more than they used too. 

If we could have gone out into space a number of years ago, and then were to go again, we would see a brighter earth from a distance. This is one reason Christ Michael and Esu are going ahead with ascension instead of evacuation for a pole reversal. This is "proof" of man's growing.  And of course 911 also had much to do with this, as a bunch of star seeds and advancing souls awakened to what was going on.

As the result of the preparation of Jupiter for ignition, it glows much brighter than it did a year ago. It is in our night sky now, has been for months. A few hours after sunset it is in the western sky, before it too sets for the night, and when in the western sky near the horizen it is now as bright as Venus, roughly. It was not this bright when it was in similar location last fall. So this is for me, some tangible proof of the work done to prepare it for ignition. I have been watching some of this closely for a few years now. Prior to then I paid little attention to the sky. I suppose I have been paying attention since about 2000.

Mars is so much brighter, and remember a couple years or so ago when it was as close to earth as it gets periodically, it was quite large and bright orange in the eastern sky at night. Much more so that past times.

Here are some links from SOHO today.

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/eit_304/1024/latest.html
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/eit_304/512/

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/eit_284/512/

There are more flares around the sun most of the time the last couple weeks or so than earlier this fall. We even had some B flares a few days ago. There are more and more "yellow" acive spots and we have now had several new cycle sunspots. The "red" sun pics on SOHO will become more orange as the yellow active spots increase. There have been several quite pretty flares recently and if you click under the "red" pics there, and for that matter the other "colors" you will find a collection of pics from the last few weeks, so you can see the process changing.

Another interesting site is "Stereo"  http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/  Stereo is two satillites, one of which moves ahead of earth and the other behind, allowing a bit more sun to be seen, and the purpose is around learning more about the CME's. There is a small collection of the best of Stereo on the site.

This link I got off of Space Weather has interesting pics from a variety of sources, and also many links to other sources. http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/images/latest.html  Enjoy!  Take care, Candace